The essential link between publishers, librarians and researchers.

 
Recent

Exploring the impact of Pledge to Open

Taylor & Francis reports on progress in its collaborative funding model initiative for open access books

Pledge to Open (P2O) is a collaborative funding model designed to work with the academic community to open important, key issue-based collections of scholarly book titles, so they are free to read, and free to publish open access for the authors.

By helping to fund open access (OA) book publishing through this collaborative funding initiative, participating institutions help disseminate important research to ensure its widest possible reach, including benefiting authors and readers from lower income countries.  Through the collaborative funding approach, the intention is twofold: to remove barriers to publishing open access – by removing the requirement of a Book Publishing Charge – and remove barriers to accessing the latest research, maximising the potential for the book content to reach a wide and diverse audience and drive real world impact.

The Pilot

Taylor & Francis launched Pledge to Open as a pilot in July 2023, and through the collective global support of 24 institutions, varying from large to small in size, 26 books have been published open access in 2024 and 2025 and made available to a global audience.  The 26 books were selected from seven key issue-based interdisciplinary collections inspired by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.  Each collection showcased 10 cutting edge research titles on a key global issue, including Climate Change, Green Renewable Energy, Wellbeing and Mental Health, and Populism and Extremism.

Measuring Early Impact

The drive towards OA publishing for scholarly books promises the benefits of increased discoverability, access, and impact – and given we were able to open 26 books as part of the Pilot, we were keen to start measuring what the impact had been, even when a book has only been OA for a few months.  In order to measure the impact of a cohort of OA publications, we used a sample comprised of 84 recently published research titles in total: this included 21 of the 26 titles that have been made OA via the Pledge to Open Pilot (the 21 OA titles have all been published for at least four months) and 63 non-OA books. Each OA title was matched with three non-OA titles of the same text type and subject area and with publication dates as close as possible to the OA title.  

Results

Following an analysis of the usage data, we were pleased to see early indications of the positive impact that immediate OA publication has had on those 26 titles published openly through the Pledge to Open pilot:

  • The OA titles in this sample on average received 12 times as many views and downloads via taylorfrancis.com as comparable non-OA titles in the first four months after publication.
  • The OA titles in this sample were on average accessed from three times as many countries and 3.5 times as many institutions via taylorfrancis.com as comparable non-OA titles in the first four months after publication.

These findings are in line with our wider research on the positive impact of OA publication on usage for born-OA titles in the first 12 months after publication.  Therefore, we’re keen to continue to track usage of the Pledge to Open titles over time to see if this positive trend continues.

The three OA titles from the Pilot with the highest usage in the first four months after publication are:

The Future

The Pilot allowed us to gain valuable insights from stakeholders around the world, with fruitful and insightful discussions around the opportunities and challenges of a collaborative funding model for OA research books.  We were encouraged to further develop the model and launched an enhanced version in September 2024, based on feedback from the Pilot. Full details can be found on the Pledge to Open website.

Once again we are focused on opening up seven important, interdisciplinary collections of topics across Routledge and CRC Press titles, including: Artificial Intelligence, Children’s Health and Welfare, and Global Security.  The pledging period began in September 2024 and closes at the end of June 2025.

Participating institutions can choose which collection, or collections, they would like to pledge towards and make a one-off contribution per collection to support its transformation to open access. To enable as much participation as possible, the collection pledging prices are tiered depending on the size of the institution, allowing for all institutions to participate and support open access. Those that choose to participate can also choose to pledge to an individual collection, or pledge to all seven collections at a preferential rate. Each participating institution will have perpetual unlimited multi-user access to all titles of the collections they pledge towards, regardless of whether we meet the funding targets required to make the books OA.

One of the new features of the second phase of Pledge to Open, is that pledging libraries can now also choose perpetual access to 50 backlist titles per collection from a wider selection of 1,000 titles. This means that should an institution choose to pledge to all seven collections, as well as pledging towards the 70 frontlist books becoming OA, in total they would have perpetual unlimited multi-user access to 420 books.

How to participate

Pledge to Open is open for support worldwide, until the end of June 2025.  Institutions interested in pledging support should contact pledgetoopen@tandf.co.uk.  Full details are available on the Pledge to Open website.

By James Watson (Open Access Books Lead) and Amy Welmers (Content Development Manager)

Do you want to read more content like this? SUBSCRIBE to the Research Information Newsline!

Back to top